


ever so dark do the stars shine

by PotterheadAvengerDemigod



Series: Is A Better Woman [2]
Category: Marvel, Marvel 3490, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Civil War (Marvel), Comfort/Angst, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, F/M, Fluff, Multiverse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prophetic Dreams, Steve Feels, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, at least its kinda angst but not really, basically feeeeeelssss, kind of, mentions, playing with the multiverse theory again, yeah like look guys multiverse theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 14:16:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3899380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PotterheadAvengerDemigod/pseuds/PotterheadAvengerDemigod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I got a nuke coming it and it's gonna blow in less than a minute! And I know just where to put it."<br/>"You know that's a one-way trip."</p>
            </blockquote>





	ever so dark do the stars shine

**Author's Note:**

> So I did this because ANGST  
> Also because this comment:   
> Loki saves the day in his usual "WTF!?!" style!!!! And poor Steve... give the man a heart attack, why don't ya?!   
> (Although it would have been nice to see them play out the original ending. I sense there would be a lot more drama there. Could that maybe be one of your alternates?)

"I can close it!" Natasha's voice echoes through the comms. ""Can anyone copy? I can shut the portal down!"

"Do it!" Steve's voice, so desperate, so hopeful.

Toni's heart clenches in her chest as the suit's mag-locks latch onto the nuke, hitching a ride as the missile makes it way to Manhattan. "Wait!"

"These things are still coming, Stark!"

"I got a nuke coming it and it's gonna blow in less than a minute! And I know just where to put it."

The comms. fall abruptly silent as everyone processes what Toni is about to do.

Steve's voice breaks the silence, and Toni can hear the choked quality, the hitch in his words. “Toni- Tones, Tones, please, please don’t do this, there has to be a better way, You can’t do this. Please. Y-you know that’s a one way trip.”

Toni switches to the private comms, so that none of the other Avengers can interrupt what may well be the last conversation she’ll ever have with her husband. “I’m sorry, love, please, I’m sorry, I have to do this, I’m sorry.”

She hears Steve’s choked-off sob, the despair in his voice. “Toni, Toni, just, please, please don’t-”

He cuts off abruptly, voice breaking.

_Please don’t leave me alone again._

Toni swallows, feeling the tears rolling down her cheeks silently, her throat convulsing, almost too dry to form words.

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry, you know I have to do this.” Toni hates herself for this, hates the pain in Steve’s voice, the plea for her not to leave him alone again. She hates herself for not being able to offer more than meaningless words, repeated over and over again, as if it’ll make anything better if she does.

Her tears are salty on her tongue.

She’s had a good few years of happiness now, of love and family, and it’s more than she deserves. But at least she’s gotten it. She can die satisfied, even if she’s too young, even if she hasn’t accomplished all she’d wanted to yet.

But she’s gotten her time with Steve, more love and care than someone as screwed up as her deserves.

And Steve hasn’t gotten 2.5 kids and a dog or a nice house in the country with a white picket fence, but even then he’d been happy, but maybe after she’d gone he’d be able to settle down and get the happily ever after that he deserved.

Toni forces the nuke up the ninety-degree angle, skimming parallel to the Tower. She desperately wants to contact Rhodey and Pepper, but there’s really no time anymore.

“J,” she manages. “Tell Pepper and Rhodey thanks for everything they’ve done for me, for dragging my ass out of every shitty problem I managed to get into, for never giving up on me. Tell them- tell them I love them, and that I’m sorry.”

“Noted, miss,” JARVIS intones, oddly muted. “And, if I may, miss, it has been a pleasure serving you.”

Something lodges in Toni’s throat, and by now her vision is almost completely blurred out with tears, and only the vaguest silhouette of the portal, a dark blurry circle, is visible. “Thanks, J.”

The portal’s right in front of her now, and she’s just that bit away from passing through it.

She switches back to comms with the others, trying to keep her voice from shaking too much. “Been nice working with you guys. Barton, Romanov, don’t let S.H.I.E.L.D. take my stuff. Hulk, keep on smashing. And tell Bruce that his brain will always be my first love. Thor, don’t stop being an gigantic adorkable puppy. Loki, well, don’t stop being badass. Steve, I’m sorry. I love you.”

She hears the outburst at that, before Steve’s voice, soft, despairing, cuts through and everything else is relegated to white noise.

“I love you too, Toni.”

The genius feels her heart clench, her stomach twisting and that bubble of unadulterated affection that she always feels whenever Steve tells her that he loves her rising in her chest, but this time tinged with an immeasurable sadness.

She passes through the portal.

Darkness.

Stars.

Inky blackness.

It’s getting hard to breathe.

The space around her is a vacuum, darkness and light, movement and stillness.

It’s suffocating.

She has one chance. One chance to stop the battle below, to save the Avengers.

To save Steve.

The nuke is still fixed to her suit.

She disengages the mag-locks on the suit, using up the last of the external Reactor's power, until all the suit is running on is her Reactor, the one in her chest.

It's not going to last very long.

JARVIS is offline, the suit is barely functioning, and all the strain is on the one thing keeping her alive.

She doesn't have enough power to keep both the suit's life support systems online and use the repulsors to fly back through the portal.

And even her suit can't make oxygen from nothing.

The last thing she sees is the fiery explosion above her, a halo of golden fire and stars.

 _Hey_ , she thinks groggily. _Fireworks._

The thought is closely followed by, _I'm sorry, Steve._

It's the last conscious thought she has.

* * *

 Everything is light and dark, heat and cold.

She's shivering, her bones are icy and brittle, but her skin is burning, flushed and clammy at the same time. There are starbursts of white going off behind her eyelids, before the darkness encroaches on everything and she submits to it yet again.

This happens countless times, and she feels like there's something she should be doing, something she should've remembered.

But all she can do is watch the flashes mindlessly, bursting to life before fizzling into nothing as suddenly as they appear.

She feels weightless, like she's floating through zero gravity, or falling. She probably is.

Everything fades out yet again.

* * *

 She sees so many different images, happy, sad, euphoric, distressing. Even downright painful.

She sees herself and Steve on their wedding day, Steve dipping her and kissing her, and she can still feel the lingering tingle on her lips now. His lips had been soft, but chapped, and his embrace strong and safe. She remembers how the veil had gotten in the way, and how she’d ended up ripping it off before the ceremony was even over. She remembers Steve’s laughing eyes, that crooked smile twisting his lips as he tried not to laugh at the scandalised gasps that had resulted.

She sees scenes from their lives, sees so many that she recognises. Then some she doesn’t.

She sees Steve in the lab on the Helicarrier, a shorter brunette man in front of him, the two yelling heatedly at each other.

She somehow instinctively knows that the man is her, in some form or the other.

Her heart breaks a little more at every word that is shouted. _(I know guys with none of that worth ten of you.)_

_(You may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.)_

_(You’re a lab rat, Rogers. Everything special about you came out of a bottle.)_

She flinches at every sentence, but this, this is all in her mind.

Isn’t it?

Then comes the one scene that she never wants to think of ever again.

She sees the suit, the suit with her in it. At the same time, it’s not her at all. It’s the guy-her again, but there are subtle differences here.

This version is slightly taller, and from what she can see through the eyeslits in the mask, he has blue eyes, as opposed to the other guy-her’s deep brown ones.

She’s on one side of a S.H.I.E.L.D. detention cell. Steve’s on the other.

Steve is looking at her -him-, glaring. She’s never seen such fury on Steve’s face. Never.

And never directed at her.

Steve’s entire face is pulled into a grim, blank mask, only anger shining through.

“Tell me, Director Stark,” he grits out, and Toni flinches back while the guy-her simply stares Steve down. Steve’s tone is blank, devoid of emotion save the barest. It chills her to her very core. “Was it worth it?”

When the guy-her simply stands there, unmoving, Steve’s face contorts in rage.

“Tell me!” He yells, heaving in gasps of air, colour high in his cheeks from anger and emotion. “WAS IT WORTH IT? TELL ME!”

That’s when guy-her finally reacts. He doesn’t move, the suit is still completely immobile, almost as if it’s empty.

“Well... You’re a sore loser, Captain America.”

He stalks away, pushing past a couple of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, and he doesn’t see the way Steve hunches in on himself in his cell, the way he cradles his head in his hands.

He doesn’t hear the bitterness in Steve’s voice when he mumbles, “You bet.”

* * *

The scene changes yet again.

It's still the same world, though. Toni can tell, because guy-her is exactly the same as in the previous scene, except that this time, although he's in the suit, he isn't wearing the helmet.

He's sitting alone in a darkened room, head down, helmet in his lap and framed by his hands. His knuckles are bone-white against the red and gold of the helmet, and his posture is screaming pain and anguish, curled in on himself.

His face is whiter than his knuckles, brow furrowed. His eyes are glimmering in the low light, suspiciously wet.

"To do what I needed to do to win this quickly," guy-her mumbles, still gripping the helmet in a death grip. "I knew that meant you and I would probably _never_ speak again. Or be friends again. Or partners again."

He closes his eyes, anguish written over every line of his face, cracks in his mask.

"I told myself I was okay with it, because I knew I was _right_ , and I- I knew I was saving lives."

Then Toni sees what he's looking at.

Lying on a cold, hard table, draped in the rags of his suit and his bloody shield resting on his chest, is Steve.

More accurately, Steve's dead body.

His eyes are closed, face calm. If it wasn't for the blood on his shield and the rips in his suit, the flecks of red on his skin, she almost would've thought he was asleep.

But no.

The guy-her looks up at Steve for a second, before his gaze once again drops.

Toni flinches back sharply, hands hovering over Steve's body- she couldn't imagine him dead.

She ends up missing half of what guy-her says next.

"-knew the world favours the underdog, and that I would be the bad guy. I knew this and I said I was okay with it. And- and even though I said... even though I said I was willing to go all the way with it... I wasn't."

He looks up at Steve's prone form then, tears streaming silently down his cheeks.

"And- and," he continues stiltedly, between gasps. "I know this because the worst has happened. The thing I can't live with... _has_ _happened_. And for all our back and forth, all the things we've said and done to each other... for all the hard questions I had to ask and terrible lies I had to tell... There's one thing I'll _never_ be able to tell _anyone_ now. Not my friends or my co-workers or my president... The one thing! The _one_ thing I _should_ have told you."

He lets out a choked sob. "But now I can't."

Breathing heavily, the man swallows visibly, angling his gaze down until all he's doing is staring at the helmet; his grief reflected back at him.

He lets out a hitched, self-deprecating laugh, forcing back a cry. "It wasn't worth it."

The scene fades to black, and the last sensation Toni feels is her heart clenching, bile rising in her throat.

* * *

Steve looks up into the sky, staring at the portal and willing Toni to return. She has to come back, she has to. He doesn’t know what he’d do without her.

Toni may still have her insecurities, and he knows that she still thinks she isn’t good enough for him, but Steve needs her.

Toni’s his rock, his support. She’s everything to him.

_Come on, love, come on. You’re so much stronger than a bunch of aliens on flying scooters. You can come back from this. If anyone can, it’s you._

All he sees through the portal is a circle of dark.

“Captain?” Natasha’s voice filters through his comms, and he freezes. He can hear the expectant note in her voice, the sadness edged with ruthlessness.

He shakes his head in denial, even though Steve knows none of the others, much less Natasha, can see him.

 _No, please, no,_ he mouths, but his vocal cords don't work, he can't do more than form the shape of the words.

 _No._ Closing the portal now means giving up on Toni, giving up on a teammate, on the one person he loves more than anything.

Closing the portal now means giving up on _them_.

And he can't do that.

Steve knows, he knows that if they don't close the portal the radiation from the nuke will start leaking through, polluting everything in its wake.

It will poison all of Manhattan.

But he can't give up on Toni. He can't.

Not if there's still a chance of her surviving, not if he can save her.

 _Close it,_ the Captain America part of him screams.

 _No,_ Steve Rogers yells back just as staunchly, but in the end he knows what he has to do.

"I- God, I-I'm sorry, Toni. I-" Steve shakes his head sharply, trying to ignore the tearing ache in his chest.

"Natasha?" He calls, injecting callousness into his voice with effort. "C-close it."

Natasha bites her lip, hearing the lost note in Steve's voice, but she doesn't comment, instead pushing the sceptre inward and forward, pushing through the energy barrier and cutting off the stream of power from the Tesseract.

The portal dims and starts closing.

The comms are completely silent, the Avengers still staring at the portal, the circle of lit cloud flickering as it shrinks.

A muffled sound comes over the comms, a hitched sob.

The Avengers freeze, hearing that sob deteriorate into constant shuddering breaths. Clint is the only one with visual of Steve, and the archer can see the silent tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face, the uncontrollable tremble of his jaw and lower lip.

That's when the portal closes fully, and the Avengers, still staring at the patch of sky, see the rim of clouds close up, and at the very last second, a blur of red and gold is expelled, like a bone being spat from the mouth of a beast.

They all hear Steve's sharp intake of breath, the harsh, broken, "Toni!"

Steve's face breaks out into a wide, relieved grin, before the smile disappears just as abruptly as it appeared, worry suddenly the only visible emotion on his face.

"S-she's not slowing down!"

A raw, feral roar rips through the air just as Thor begins to spin his hammer in preparation for takeoff, and the Hulk leaps from one of the still-standing buildings, roars echoing off the concrete jungle around him.

He snatches Toni out of the air, cradling the limp red and gold form to his chest as he lands, taking the impact of the landing.

The Hulk puts Toni down with a gentleness that belies his size, laying the unresponsive form of the genius down on the rubble and dust covered ground.

Thor rips the faceplate off the suit before Steve can so much as look for reporters or other civilians -he knows how much Toni's secret identity means to her.

Either way, there aren't any people nearby at all except the downed Chitauri and the other Avengers.

Steve turns back to the downed suit, and the first thing he sees is the pallid, ghost-white of Toni's skin, the scarlet blood dripping sluggishly from a shallow gash on her hairline.

The contrast is frighteningly sharp, blood red against stark white, and for a long moment all Steve can see is Bucky's blood against the white, white snow of the mountain.

He shakes himself out of it, pushing forward until he's kneeling by Toni's side, leaning all his weight on his hands, scratched up and bloody, pressed against the ground in an effort to hold himself upright.

The scrapes on his hands sting, and he can feel the cement dust creeping into the cracks in his skin, biting deep, but all he can think about is Toni.

He reaches for the hidden releases on the suit, gently pulling the helmet off Toni's head and resting her bloodied hair in his lap, before reaching for the gauntlets and chestplate, carefully peeling the genius out of her metal ~~coffin~~ suit.

He feels the tears beginning to track their way down his cheeks again, the sight of the dim, unlit Reactor tugging at him, and he'd do anything to see that white-blue glow again.

He combs his fingers through Toni's snarled locks, feeling helpless even as he stares down at the supine form of his unconscious (not dead, _not dead_ ) wife.

What can he do? He can't pull a miracle out of thin air, but he can't but he can't sit by and stare at the one person he loves more in the world, not breathing and complexion almost gray, and not do a single thing.

Then Hulk roars. It's deep, guttural roar, primal and wild.

It's a sound so loud and bone-jarring, so completely bestial that Steve immediately starts, jerking violently until Toni's head almost slips off his lap.

When he reaches out his hands to steady her, that's when the genius jerks awake, dark eyes snapping open as her entire forms pulls taut, every muscle tensing abruptly before relaxing just as suddenly.

The Reactor flickers back to life.

"Wha-" she starts, before registering Steve's worried form hovering above her.

An impish smile begins to form on her lips, an expression so inherently Toni that Steve immediately relaxes. "Please tell me you kissed me."

Steve's grimy face lights up, a smile stretching his lips as he grins down at Toni.

"Well," he begins. "I didn't, but..."

He leans down, careful to continue supporting Toni's head, and presses his lips to hers, wincing at the iron tang of blood on her lips even as he carefully maneuvers them so that they're in a more comfortable position, Toni's body pressed up against him, leaning her weight on him.

He tangles his fingers in her hair, letting the messy strands slip through his fingers while he unconsciously works on untangling them, the other hand at her waist, keeping her upright and supporting her weight.

Toni mumbles something as they finally break apart, wrapping her arms around Steve's torso and pressing her face to the patch of exposed skin below where the collar of his costume got ripped.

She pulls back from her death grip on Steve's shoulders, smiling at the soldier even as she leans in to peck him on the cheek.

"Love you, Stevie."

Steve grins back. "Love you too, Tones."

* * *

When they get back to the Tower that evening, all the Avengers crash into their allocated guest rooms, leaving Steve and Toni to settle into their room, curling instinctively around each other as they fall asleep.

Steve is woken that night by screams that deteriorate into muffled whimpers, as if they're being pressed into a pillow.

His eyes dart to Toni, who's curled in on herself, huddled under the blankets with her back pressing into Steve's front.

He immediately resituates himself so that Toni is facing him, her face pressed into his shoulder and his arms pulling her flush against him.

That's when Steve feels the hot tears soaking into his skin, the slight, repressed shaking of her shoulders as she curls closer into Steve.

He focuses, and his enhanced hearing picks up, "-dark, so dark. Don't wanna die, Stevie, don't let me go."

Steve barely pushes back the shudders that threaten to wrack his frame at the words, trying to imagine the loneliness of space, trying to imagine what it must have been like.

He guesses that it must've been something like the ice.

The supersoldier gently hushes Toni, wrapping his arms solidly around her shivering frame.

"So cold," she mumbles. "So _alone_."

He presses a kiss to her hair, rubbing a soothing hand between her shoulderblades. "It's alright, Tones. I've got you, darling, you're not alone."

Toni shudders and presses herself closer.

They're not the only nightmares she has, and Steve's seen her like this before, but this time he was there when it happened, and this time he can do something about it before the stars become a permanent part of her fears.

He hugs her tighter. "It's alright, darling, I'm here. You're safe."

Toni melts into his embrace, her tense, quivering muscles slowly relaxing as Steve massages the fear out of them, her eyelids beginning to droop ever so slightly. When the genius sags against his form, sleep claiming her, Steve finally stops his mumbled reassurances, pulling the blankets back up around them and holding her close.

Toni doesn't have any more nightmares that night.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So, this became kinda screwy... And multiverse theory! I'm sorry couldn't resist...


End file.
